Transforming Scientists’ Science into School Science

- Ajay Sharma and Charles W. Anderson

- Michigan State University

Presented as part of the Paper Set: A Longitudinal Study of Science Teacher Preparation at the Annual Meeting of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching, Philadelphia, March 23-26, 2003.

This work was supported in part by grants from the Knowles foundation and the United States Department PT3 Program (Grant Number P342A00193, Yong Zhao, Principal Investigator). The opinions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the position, policy, or endorsement of the supporting agencies.

Introduction:

This is a paper about the education of prospective secondary science teachers, who typically begin their careers as successful science students in the K-12 schools and successful science majors in college. We know that even after years of success in their science classes, many teachers are poorly prepared for standards-based science teaching with its emphasis on application and inquiry. In this paper, we attempt to trace these teachers’ problems to their roots in the recontextualization of scientific knowledge for classroom teaching and to illustrate the consequences of this recontextualization for the practices of beginning teachers.

Science as done and communicated in the scientific world is in many ways different from the way it is understood and thus represented by teachers and textbooks in classrooms. The difference being largely due to the different discursive contexts in which science is practiced in labs vis-à-vis classrooms. Thus, in the transformation from a discipline to a school subject, science undergoes a fundamental transition both in terms of knowledge and practice. The transformation of science from a scientist’s lab to a science classroom has important implications for orientations towards scientific knowledge that teacher candidates bring to the class as they learn to teach, and also for how they manage to operationalize their orientations in classrooms.

This paper is an attempt to understand this transformative process, and its implications for prospective science teachers. We synthesize what research has to say about science discourse in research communities and schools, and how it gets transformed while on its journey from lab to a classroom. We then use this synthesis to analyze data from an ongoing study of how novice teachers (seniors, interns and recent graduates of the Michigan State University’s secondary science teacher education program) learn to teach science. Our study reveals a crucial lacuna in the way teacher education is conceptualized with important implications for the expectations we have for our prospective science teachers. We are seeking to address this problem by pursuing an alternative approach to science teacher education that recognizes the demands of school science while retaining the essential elements of scientific knowledge and practice.

(I) Images of Science – lab and classroom.

(A) Science as practiced by scientists.

The task of science is both to extend our experience and reduce it to order, and this task represents various aspects, inseparably connected with each other. Only by experience itself do we come to recognize those laws which grant us a comprehensive view of the diversity of phenomena. As our knowledge becomes wider we must always be prepared, therefore, to expect alterations in the points of view best suited for the ordering of our experience.

- Neils Bohr. (1934, quoted in Hawkins, 1990)

The quote above conveys one scientist’s image of what doing science is all about. However, it is not a soliloquy by scientists that one gets to hear in the public arena about how scientific inquiry is understood. On tuning in, one finds oneself amidst an animated and often cacophonous dialogue of many voices – big and small. Further, scientists rarely speak in one voice nowadays. Thus, over time, the portrayal of scientific practice has become a fiercely contested terrain. In this section, we attempt to navigate this terrain with the objective of perceiving (hearing, rather) the harmony, if any, that may be emerging out of this vigorous intermingling of different voices, and in the process add our own little voice to this chorus.

In portraying something as contested as scientific inquiry, we at the outset acknowledge the dangers of succumbing to the temptation of a totalizing impulse that “reduces heterogeneity to homogeneity, difference to an economy of the same, the contingent to the determinate, and the flux to the stable and the given.” (Usher, 2000). What generally happens is that while portraying what doing science is all about, it is presupposed that: (a) There is ‘An’ image of scientific inquiry to be discovered or to be agreed upon; and (b) a list of tenets can describe that portrayal. Thus, as Elfin et al comment, “there is believed to be one essence of nature or set of criteria that describes all and only the activities that count as science” (Elfin et al, 1999, p. 108). Such totalizing impulses end up pushing contending voices to the periphery. Instead, Elfin et al advocate Wittgenstein’s view that science should be treated as a ‘family resemblance’ concept. That is, “science” should not be seen as a sharply defined concept, but should be considered as denoting a series of paradigmatic examples including “other closely similar activities” (Eflin et al, 1999, p. 108).

However, treating science as a ‘family resemblance’ concept does suppose at least some common strands that run through the different paradigmatic examples that associated with doing science. For instance, as Lederman et al argue, there is a general agreement on the theory-laden nature of scientific observations (2002, p. 499). In fact, the recent science education reform documents are based upon and reflect the common ground among different contending voices. Thus, it is now largely non-controversial to contend that:

  1. Fundamentally, the various scientific disciplines are alike in their reliance on evidence, the use of hypothesis and theories, the kinds of logic used, and much more.
  2. Nevertheless, scientists differ greatly from one another in what phenomena they investigate and in how they go about their work; in the reliance they place on historical data or on experimental findings and on qualitative or quantitative methods; in their recourse to fundamental principles; and in how much they draw on the findings of other sciences.
  3. Science demands evidence. However, scientists may often disagree about the value of a particular piece of evidence, or about the appropriateness of particular assumptions that are made—and therefore disagree about what conclusions are justified.
  4. Science is a blend of logic and imagination. Scientists do not work only with data and well-developed theories. Often, they have only tentative hypotheses about the way things may be. Such hypotheses are widely used in science for choosing what data to pay attention to and what additional data to seek, and for guiding the interpretation of data.
  5. Science explains and predicts.
  6. Scientists try to identify and avoid bias.
  7. Science is a complex social activity. (Benchmarks for Scientific Literacy, 1993)

In this list, by no means definitive or complete, the last point of science being a complex social activity deserves some elaboration, since many portrayals of scientific inquiry tend to overdetermine what it means to do science. The various sociological studies of science, Latour and Woolgar’s laboratory study (1986) for example, have persuasively shown “the highly social nature of science and have established the central role of the scientific community in the production of scientific knowledge.” (Cunningham and Helms, 1998, p.488). Scientists do science as members of different, embedded communities such as their laboratory group, the scientists at their institution, the scientists who conduct related research, and the scientists in their disciplinary fields. Cunningham and Helms further argue, “Although research projects may initially be conducted in isolation, for ideas or results to become acknowledged as a new science fact or theory, they must ultimately be accepted by the larger community of scientists. Therefore, much of scientists’ work entails persuading colleagues that their findings are valid.” (1998, p.488)

Seen from such a sociological perspective, scientific inquiry requires engagement in dialogic discursive relationships with other members of the community for persuasive purposes, and for “creating webs of relationships so strong that certain ideas, objects, facts become black boxed, and are thereafter no longer seen as competitive sites of struggle”. (Bazerman, 1988, p.16). As Bazerman would agree, this is a highly political and rhetorical view of science. Here a science laboratory is basically perceived as “a factory where facts are produced on an assembly line” (Latour and Woolgar, 1986, p. 236).

While the rhetoric of the social construction of scientific facts is quite persuasive, basing an account of science solely on this rhetoric runs the risk of underplaying or even ignoring the experiential aspects of doing science. After all, it can hardly be forgotten that science is fundamentally an attempt to extend our experience and understanding of nature. Thus, apart from functioning in different discursive dialogic relationships with fellow scientists, a scientist is also an active participant in a most integral manner, either individually or collectively, in different ongoing dialogues with nature. These two dialogic relationships – with nature and with scientific community – go hand-in-hand deeply and inalienably intertwined, each enriching and building upon the other to create the different paradigmatic examples of doing science.

Thus, as Bacon advocated the natural philosophers of his age to do, reading and interpreting the ‘book of nature’ lies at the heart of scientific inquiry and the social construction of scientific knowledge. Scientific knowledge, though shaped by the scientific discourse and rhetorical intentions, basically emerges from and rests upon a vast experiential base that helps scientists discern patterns (e.g. laws and generalizations) in the accumulated body of experience (Bazerman, 1988, Chapter 11), and finally enables them to distill a much smaller number of explanations in terms of models and theories, etc. Thus, scientific understanding is achieved when scientists develop and are able to achieve a consensus in the scientific community upon coherent persuasive sets of experiences, patterns, and explanations – the experiences provide a valid basis for the patterns and explanations, while the patterns and explanations make the experiences meaningful.

Our society values science because it produces useful knowledge. Thus, in addition to expanding their knowledge through inquiry, scientists use their knowledge to help us understand and control the material world. Scientific models and theories are tools that can be used to describe the world with precision, to explain why things are the way they are, to make predictions about the future, and to design technological systems.

Science as done by scientists is critically influenced by the way it is communicated with other fellow scientists. What is communicated determines what is done, and vice versa. Thus, in the next section we turn to written scientific communication to understand how it shapes scientific discourses.

(B) Written Scientific Communication:

Since doing science involves engaging in a discursive dialogue with the scientific community, communicating scientific research is a big part of a scientist’s work. This communication is situated in a scientific discourse that not only assumes some shared knowledge, but also cohabitation in shared conceptual, experiential, and socio-cultural worlds (Bazerman, 1988). A scientific discourse, as Locke (1992, p.13) opines, is basically “an organ of persuasion” where the communication is largely geared towards the rhetorical objective of persuading themselves and other scientists (friends, skeptics and rivals) that their perceived and interpreted sets of experiences, patterns and explanations are important and valid. This act of persuasion involves engaging in a “discursive back and forth by which researchers stake claims, attempt to advance them, and are restrained by gatekeepers and opponents, who attempt to restrict claims. Arguments move through various spheres, from the funding cycle, to publication, to the popular realm, each with characteristic methods of presentation and resistance, tropes and dynamics of knowledge negotiation.” (Bazerman, 1998, p. 18).

Though it is particularly difficult to realize in the case of written scientific communication, the need to persuade others has, and still does, played a pivotal role in shaping both its form and content. As Bazerman (1988) documents in Shaping Written Knowledge, the genre of modern scientific article arose from Newton’s search for the most persuasive, compelling form of written communication so as to not only create a shared appreciation of his experiments about the nature of light, but also to constrain and construct his readers’ reasoning, experience and perceptual framework in such a way that they were effectively persuaded to accept his “facts” as reliably reconstitutable phenomena for all to see (p. 317). With the passage of time, the genre evolved to take its present shape through gradual institutionalization and codification of the different features of the scientific article that were found most suited, in the collective wisdom of the scientific community, as powerful rhetorical devices. In fact, Bazerman claims that the genre of scientific article has proved so successful in its rhetorical objectives that it has become “an authoritative model to be emulated by other disciplines, interpreted through their own perceptions and problems” (p.316).

Though the lay perception is of scientific inquiry and communication as being related but distinct activities, laboratory studies have shown the interdependence of writing, research and the production of scientific knowledge (Cunningham and Helms, 1998, p.485). Bazerman while talking of the evolution of the patterns of communications in scientific journals concludes “Institutionalized patterns of representation not only shape the form of the utterance, but all the activity leading up to, surrounding, and following after the utterance. … In the case of Compton we have seen how his activity, his normative behavior, and his basic perception of the cognitive task he was engaged in were shaped by the form of the answer that he was seeking. We have examined how the patterns of argumentation impel the strategies of argumentation and the surrounding activity.” (1988, p.316) In other words, as elucidated earlier, the dialogue among scientists recursively intertwines, occasions and shapes (as it is in turn shaped by) the dialogue with nature.

Now, let us look at some of the distinguishing features of written scientific communication so as to accentuate the contrast with science as communicated through textbooks in school – an issue we shall be turning to in the next section. The first and foremost trait that catches ones attention is how effectively written scientific communication, as in research papers and articles, is able to conceal its rhetoric. As Locke comments, “It is a hallmark of the official rhetoric of science that it denies its own existence, that it claims to be not a rhetoric but a neutral voice, a transparent medium for the recording of scientific facts without distortion” (1992, p. 112). Thus, the text appears “objective” with the sole purpose of being written for the record, and not for persuading the readers. Further, the rhetorical devices employed in the research communication hide the social construction of scientific facts and given them the appearance of being make hard, solid and hence objective and true.

Second, the rhetorical demands on a scientific text inadvertently act such that the text presents an edited, even distorted image of scientific inquiry. As laboratory studies have shown, construction of scientific knowledge is an attempt to create order out of disorganized experience that scientists have to grapple with while at work on the laboratory bench. There is no rigid scientific method that can be followed to yield replicable incontrovertible ‘hard’ scientific facts. As Benchmarks for Scientific Literacy document admits, “Scientific inquiry is more complex than popular conceptions would have it. It is, for instance, a more subtle and demanding process than the naive idea of "making a great many careful observations and then organizing them." It is far more flexible than the rigid sequence of steps commonly depicted in textbooks as "the scientific method." It is much more than just "doing experiments," and it is not confined to laboratories.”

Thus, what gets reported is a highly sanitized image of how science is done. An image cleansed of all the messiness and confusion that characterizes scientific laboratories. An image that portrays scientific knowledge as consisting of “unproblematic, unambiguous, repeatable truths revealed by adherence to a rule-bound scientific method that rests on observations and is confirmed by experiments” (Collins and Shapin, as quoted in Cuningham and Helms, 2001, p. 485). Some scientists are candid enough to admit as much. For instance noble laureate Roald Hoffman avers, “What is written in a scientific periodical is not a true and faithful representation (if such a thing were possible) of what transpired. It is not a laboratory notebook, and one knows that that notebook in turn is only a partial reliable guide to what took place. It is more or less … carefully constructed man – or woman – made text.” (As quoted in Locke, 1992, p. 8). The reasons why this is so are the same as discovered by Newton during his efforts to convince his colleagues and rivals about his theory of optics - an unedited reporting of scientific inquiry hardly makes for a persuasive account.

Third, construction of scientific knowledge places tough demands on the semiotic resources of the language of communication. As scientific knowledge tends to be cumulative during the periods of ‘Normal Science’, research communication usually sits at the top of a large body of experience and practice. Thus for meaningful communication at the frontiers of research, a substantial body of shared knowledge and experience is assumed among researchers. However, as reference to this shared knowledge base is necessary, much of this knowledge is compacted into technical terms and symbols, for the sake of economy and efficiency of communication, in research literature. Halliday’s grammatical semantics reveals that an important means of compacting scientific knowledge into a few words and symbols is the process of nominalization, i.e. the process by which verbs (actions and events) are turned into nouns (things and concepts). Bazerman giving an account of Halliday’s grammatical semantics reports an increase of nominalization in science communication over time (1998, p. 19). This has served to create rising hierarchies of abstractions with texts becoming less descriptive of action and more populated by abstract objects and concepts. One important consequence of increasing nominalization has been that scientific concepts become increasingly remote from concrete experience. Thus, according to Bazerman, “… at each stage of the abstracting nominalization process, concrete referential information is lost, so that the material meaning of higher order nominals becomes increasingly hard to follow and agree on.” (1998, pp. 19-20). This nominalization process not only keeps scientific knowledge accessible only to a small group of researchers (and perhaps thereby adding to the mystique and power of science), but also bears, as we shall shortly see, important consequences for the learning of science in schools.